


Life is Strange: Behind the Scenes

by DevinTowerwood



Category: Life Is Strange
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Everyone else coping with all the mystical shit, F/F, F/M, Gen, headcanons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 18:32:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7652188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DevinTowerwood/pseuds/DevinTowerwood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Formerly part of my Life is Strange AUs, these are canon-compliant Original Universe pieces about exploring moments that were skipped by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Goodbye to Everything That I Knew

They surrounded Max like the toys of a frantic child. The photographs, all blue and yellow, were laid out as carefully as she could manage, but still her rug was covered of them. Five years. She’d missed five years. It was a good thing that Rachel had been a photographer, too.

Max opened up the second box of photos, and quickly recognized the one on top. Her breath caught as she remembered the day - Chloe with her arm around Max, on the day that William died. It must have been the last of the polaroids - those were always William’s thing, and it looked like Rachel had been digital.  
As she lifted the photo to inspect it more closely, she traced a finger down along the side of it, as if tempting a paper cut. But no pain, no pain from the paper at least. God, Joyce. She’d had her whole family torn away, except for Chloe’s step-dad. This wasn’t fair to her. Her husband, her daughter.

It finally felt like she might cry. But there was a knock on the door.

At first, Max was quiet, not sure how to respond. Nobody had wanted to disturb her, probably because they had no clue what to say, if they even knew that Max had been involved.

“Max? . . . Max, can I come in?”  
Shit, Victoria. She’d never knocked before. And Max couldn’t exactly deal with her right now. But at the same time, she didn’t sound hostile.

“Yeah.” Max was surprised to find her throat a lot more fucked up than her eyes - but Victoria seemed to hear her nonetheless, because the door opened.  
“Oh,” the blonde gasped almost immediately, seeing the dozens of photographs scattered in a huge arc around Max, leaving her with only a few feet of space in the entrance. She looked hardly any different - she was just as made up and dressed up as usual, but Max could see the redness of her eyes, and remembered why she was sitting here in the first place. “Is this her?” Victoria asked, gingerly stepping inside Max’s unfamiliar room.

Max just gave a nod, and looked back at the photograph in her hand briefly before setting it aside like the others, not wanting to prompt Victoria to ask about it in particular.  
“I heard you two were friends. Like, best friends.”

Max nodded again, and her eyes back down towards the pool of photos, more to avoid looking at Victoria than to see them. Victoria closed the door behind her and sat down on her knees, laying her hands in her lap and looking around Max’s room a little - at the photo wall in particular, but just trying to get her bearings, and avoid looking at the photos of the girl that Nathan had killed.  
“What was her name?”

“Chloe. Chloe Elizabeth Price.” The brunette swallowed, biting back the fresh feelings, and tried to focus on the person here. People keep you out of your feelings. “What do you want, Victoria?”

That seemed to almost puzzle her, even though she knew her exact answer. She’d rehearsed it. She’d never have come without a reason. It was just hard to say. Saying it, talking about it, made it all more true. “I’m like . . . the closest thing Nathan had to family, a real family, ever since his sister left. I feel responsible for him, and of course for the way I’ve treated you. I wanted to be able to say I was sorry - sorry for what he did, and that I didn’t stop him. I should have known something was up with him a long time ago, but I was so busy protecting him that I-”

“Victoria.”

“Uh, yeah Max?”

Max’s eyes were still trained on all the photos that she’d missed. “I don’t blame you. You didn’t know he had a gun. You didn’t know that he’d kidnapped Chloe, or Kate, or anyone. And you weren’t there. You couldn’t have stopped him. But I was there, and I heard that he had a gun, but I just hid. I mean, I just sat there because I was scared - I didn’t even realize it was Chloe and I was scared and I didn’t do anything. Even when he shot her I just hid while she died and I let her die-” somewhere in there, Max and Victoria couldn’t keep avoiding each other’s eyes, and as Max’s finally cracked in pain and she finally, finally began to cry, the change felt like a stab in Victoria’s gut, or her heart.  
She stood and tiptoed as carefully as she could to avoid the photos until she crouched by Max’s side. 

“Max, Max, you could have been killed. I know what he’s like at his worst . . . or when he’s on something, at least. You didn’t know he’d use it. I don’t think he knew he’d use it. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.” Those words were so familiar to her, and it felt both familiar and horribly wrong as her arms wrapped around Max’s shoulders, but, surprisingly, Max did not pull away.  
“But - she didn’t even know I was there! I hadn’t seen her in five years and I only saw her die. I never got to explain anything. And Nathan, they think he killed her girlfriend, too, Rachel. She was so alone.” Max’s hand clung to the back of Victoria’s arm like she’d grip her bag.

“I . . . I’m so sorry, Max. I’m so sorry.”  
So, it had been Nathan, not Jefferson. Victoria hadn’t known that. Her friend hadn’t been all right for a long time. She just hadn’t realized to what degree. But with Max falling apart into her shoulder, one thing, at least, felt normal. Victoria felt like she had someone to take care of.  
“They’re going to put him away, Max. Both of them, Jefferson and Nathan. There’s no way they’re walking away after what happened. Nathan’s . . . gone.”

Max knew she was trying to be comforting, by adding some degree of justice to the situation. But Max was not a foolish girl, even when she was scared and in pain. She could hear what ‘gone’ meant to Victoria. And for some reason, it was that that was comforting, or that at least helped her calm her breathing.  
“He was like . . . your family,” Max uttered.

Victoria’s voice trembled a little on the simple note, “Yeah.”

Max let her grip on Victoria’s arm abate, and peeled it slowly away from her body until Victoria dropped her arms. Max turned and scooted away from Victoria, leaning her back against the frame of her bed. Victoria turned and sat against Max’s couch - Max with her legs out in front of her, Victoria still on her knees, proper beyond the last straw.  
“I’m sorry, Victoria. I’m sorry for you. You don’t deserve to lose your best friend, either. But I . . . I want those fuckers to pay for what they did. Not just to Chloe, but to Kate, and to Rachel, and everyone else they hurt. Nathan, or Jefferson - they might get out one day, but Chloe’s never getting out once we put her in the ground.”

Max had never looked Victoria in the eye like this, but it was almost exactly what Victoria had come looking for - the anger and indignation that she knew they deserved, that she wanted to eat up for her guilt. “I know,” Victoria replied. “But they won’t ever hurt someone again. Not even the Prescotts have that much money.”

Max just nodded again, looking at her feet. “Good.” And the word hung there, still.

Victoria took to looking at the pictures, trying to let the tension abate without just leaving; she leaned over them from her seat without touching any, not wanting to disturb them, recognizing when a space was sacred. “She was . . . beautiful,” Victoria said, not knowing what else she could deduce respectively from any of the recent photos.

Max nodded again, reaching up to swipe some of the hair away from her forehead. She pulled her knees a bit closer to her chest, looking over the photos again without really seeing any. “Yeah, she was. She was . . . my first crush. She got so punk while I was away - but, I mean, she always loved sci-fi, so it was only a matter of time.”  
Victoria gave a bit of an appreciative huff, but just kept looking.

Max had been having so many thoughts, looking through the photos; “She and Rachel . . . they must have been something. Chloe loved . . . science - I mean, like. all of it, but engineering and astronomy. And I heard that Rachel was a model, and she was studying for a legal degree at the community college her senior year. They must have been an amazing couple.”

That prompted a long sigh from Victoria, as she noticed a few of the two together - frequently, frequently together, but never quite couple-y. “I never met Chloe, I don’t think. But Rachel, she partied with the Vortex Club - and it looks like they both hung with the skaters, but I don’t think I ever saw them together.”

“Huh . . . the way her mom talked, it sounded like they were inseparable. Chloe - she really took a hit when Rachel disappeared.” Max pulled another photo from the photo box - one of Chloe performing an ollie while her hair was still long and blonde, probably when she was just picking up skating.

“I . . . her funeral - it’s Friday, right? Rachel’s family, they haven’t put out an obituary yet. I guess, even with how long she was gone, they didn’t believe she could be dead.”

Another nod from Max. If only she knew how to communicate more nonverbally. “Yeah, Friday at five, at the cemetery close to the light house. She and I used to have a, a ‘pirate fort’ near there, and her mom thought she might. Like it.”

Victoria watched the tension in her neck change as the mixture of nostalgia and grief struck Max, but she welled up the resolve to finish her question: “Can I come with you? To pay my respects to her family. I don’t need to tell them about me and Nathan but I just want to . . . see.”

That made only the vaguest, strangest sense to Max. But she didn’t want to feel any more alone than she already did. “Okay, Victoria.”

“Okay, Max.”

The blonde leaned forward on her knees and dragged herself a bit forward, and pulled Max into another hug, but this time Max was capable of reciprocating it, holding her much more tightly than she thought any hug with Victoria would ever be.


	2. The End of the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warren and Taylor have a chat underneath two moons during the End of the World Party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major canon:  
> \- Kate is alive  
> \- Max comforted Victoria & Taylor  
> \- Max rejected Warren at every turn  
> \- Max did not stop Warren from beating Nathan

_Headcanon background can be found in[this chapter of Memories.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4915876/chapters/11277730)_

Warren had to admit that he wasn’t in a good way, and he had virtually no idea why that could be. This wasn’t the first time in his life he’d had beer, after all - since he was fourteen, he’d always had a little bit of dark beer or wine or something on holidays with his family. While he had previously demonstrated that he should never have more than a small bit, it was not like he’d just binged in adolescent rebellion. He was just so tipsy and confused after a little beer. And the two moons in the sky was doing nothing to abate his confusion.

He’d been sitting on the planter just outside of the Blackwell parking lot for a while now. He was not entirely sure just how long, but he figured it must have been a while because he was finally getting cold, despite how hot the party had been.  
This was his first Vortex Club function. While the guilt associated with Kate’s video and her attempted suicide hung over them, it only further induced their need to escape reality, and the End of the World Party had felt like a necessity. Warren had even seen Brooke and Daniel inside, hardly regular party-goers. Hell, the fact that they’d let him in when he was so much younger than everyone else felt pretty extraordinary. Maybe it was the black eye. Maybe it was just thinking about the hell of this week. Who knows. But Warren had needed a drink, and he could have gone for a dance too, if only he weren’t so dizzy. Then again, this double moon was just so _cool_. If he’d been in his right senses, he probably would have been freaking out a bit more about it.

There were steps behind him. This was nothing new - people were moving in and out, arriving late or sneaking off to make out. He didn’t think about it too much.  
“Oh, hey Warren. Do you mind if I sit here?”

Warren was not entirely sure he recognized the voice. He turned his body to the left, his solo cup still hanging aimlessly in his hand like he planned to sometime take another sip, and looked up, quick to recognize the face. “Taylor?” He asked, really confused at the question. At least, he was until he saw her line of sight and realized she was, in fact, asking if she could sit on the planter overlooking the parking lot, too. “Oh, yeah, totally.” He scooted over a little, despite the fact that Taylor had about six feet to work with already.

“Thanks,” she said pointlessly, and scooted about three feet onto the planter so the bushes on it hid her body entirely from anyone turning the corner from the pool.  
She sighed, and visibly deflated, as if attempting to force the tension from her body outside, then turned her head up. Her face pinched a little bit. “Well, that’s fucking weird,” she said, noticing the moon.  
Warren nodded, taking another sip of his beer before setting it down, as if it would make him seem cool to just appear to be wraping up. It’s not like Taylor addressed him under regular circumstances, so he’d have to be as chill as possible with this opportunity. “It looks like it really is the end of the world,” he replied as nonchalantly as possible.

He expected her to shake this off, or tell him that was just the name of the party, or otherwise deflect what he’d just said. Instead, she tossed back a tone of wonder: “I guess it might be, huh? We’d never really know ahead of time.”  
He wanted to correct that, mention that most extinction-level events would be easily predictable, just difficult to prevent. But that was probably not exactly what she meant by it.   
Instead, he said what was on his mind, like she seemed to be, “Well, that would be a hell of a punch line after this week’s wind up. Everything just sort of went to shit, I guess.”

Taylor nodded repeatedly, and her chin turned down again, her hair spilling out over her shoulders as she looked down at where the concrete met the asphalt. Something was eating at her. Warren might be shitty at knowing what to say, but he wasn’t a dolt at seeing when something needed to be said. He was about to speak up again, but Taylor beat him to it, “It did, didn’t it? Kate’s in the hospital, Tori’s just trying to get wasted, and I think Max might be hunting Nathan down right now. And, speaking of him, I hear he got the shit kicked out of him today . . . but. I guess. I guess he raped Kate, didn’t he? So I guess that’s sort of a good thing.” Taylor’s tone sounded . . . defeated to Warren. It was just like she was reading off the events of the week, but Warren got that. Facing everything was not what anyone was here to do.

“Sorry about that,” Warren murmured, thinking about earlier today with Nathan. Until he’d hit sophomore year, Warren had been in fights constantly, especially since he skipped two grades, moving straight into the fifth grade when he was supposed to be entering the third. Schools had always seemed to treat it like it was play until high school. Warren at that point was so much smaller than his classmates there had been no point in fighting back, and in fact his inability to fight back had proven to be the thing that saved his record and let him come to Blackwell. But today, with Nathan . . . even if he’d said his fury was all righteous, on Kate’s behalf, or Max’s, or whatever, that wasn’t entirely true. Nathan was just a target, like Warren had been a target. It didn’t help that Nathan probably deserved it, because that was not why Warren had done it.

Taylor finally turned her head to look at Warren, and although he tried to avoid her look, his own curiosity turned his head after a moment, and he realized that she wasn’t just looking at him, she was inspecting him. His face. His hands. There was something practiced about it. “It was you, then. You’re the one who beat Nathan.”  
Warren was surprised himself at his flat faced response. “Yeah,” he admitted, as if it were nothing. He kept eye contact with Taylor for a moment, something he could certainly never proclaim to have done before.  
Her lips quirked and pursed to the side, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. Just intent. “Good, then. Fuck him.”

This only confused Warren. Not that she exactly expected her to freak out considering everything else that happened, but he definitely hadn’t expected anything positive. “Aren’t you . . . kind of friends with him, though? Do you really believe he did it?” This line of questioning finally brought Warren to avert his gaze, looking forward out over the parking lot again.

Taylor continued to look for a moment, but then her eyes slid back ahead once again. “I guess we were. But I know he took Kate from the party last night - I mean, I helped tape him pulling her off those jocks. And I know from Victoria how Kate looked the following morning. I can put two and two together. So fuck him.”  
It wasn’t even that easy for Warren to condemn Nathan. He’d honestly just believed it because it helped justify his hatred for a rich douchebag. But it seemed like Taylor had legitimately known what happened. It was probably due to that that Max and her friend Chloe had been snooping around the boys’ dorm earlier. But now he was only more confused; “Wait, so, if you knew . . . why. Why did you bully Kate?”

Taylor looked down to her hands now, the pale extensions of her concealed, sweating arms. She picked at her short nails, and Warren noticed now that, unlike Victoria and Courtney, hers were too uneven and jagged to be painted. It was one of the first times he really distinguished Taylor from Courtney as betas to Victoria.  
“Because I wanted to blame her,” Taylor murmured. “I felt like . . . I felt like when she preached at us, you know, like it was personal. She was always so vocal about abstinence and everything, and I know everyone says she’s like, super nice, but sometimes she was kind of hurtful, you know? She made me feel like chewed-up gum. So I didn’t think of her as a victim. I just thought of her as chewed-up gum. But, I guess . . . I dunno. That wasn’t fair. I never wanted . . . you know. What happened.”’

Warren rubbed the side of his jaw like he was expecting to find stubble. He really didn’t know. He had no idea what she was talking about, really. He didn’t understand the idea of taking vengeance on somebody that you saw yourself in. Then again . . . didn’t he? He and Nathan resembled each other about as much as Taylor and Kate did. Still. That was not something he wanted to acknowledge. “Y’know, I really appreciate that you’re being real with me Taylor, but that was really fucked up. I mean, if Max hadn’t gotten up there-”

“I know,” Taylor responded, cutting him off curtly.  
He figured he deserved that.  
She took a sharp breath in. “But she did. Max saved her. We just . . . we’ve got to stop fucking up.” Her face fell into her hands, and she pulled her hair back in frustration, though after a moment she released the tension and just pulled her hair off to the side.

Warren watched her squirm in her distress for a while, trying to understand exactly what he was seeing. It was strange for someone who did something shitty to clearly acknowledge how shitty they had been. If she were defensive, he could feel justified in attacking her, feel decent, like some sort of protector. But Taylor wanted to fall on a sword.  
“Look . . .” Warren began, but seemed to struggle for words. He swallowed, and started again, “Taylor, I don’t think you’re all as bad as you think you are. Like, you fucked up, yeah, but nobody wants to think about how much pain other people can be in. It’s pretty incredible . . . how you’re responding. I’ve always thought you were such a bitch but this is . . . nice. You seem really human.”

This prompted a scathing look from Taylor. This seemed worse to her than anything else he’d said. “I’ve always been human, Warren. It’s not my fault if you have trouble seeing that.”

He was just left in silence for a while, looking anywhere but at her. Yeah, this is about what he expected. He probably shouldn’t have first tried to talk to her after drinking . . . anything. Or at all, probably.

She deflated again. “But, I mean, you’re right. I don’t want to think about it. But I could hear Kate sobbing three floors up. And I couldn’t pretend anymore.”

Back to silence, but it was not the tense awkwardness of a few seconds ago. It felt bare - definitely not comfortable, but they weren’t grating on each other. It was just silence under two moons, neither entirely sure if it belonged in the sky.

A voice came from beyond the bushes.  
“Oh, christ, I just got a text from Nathan. He says there won’t be any evidence left after he’s done.”  
A second voice, much more recognizable - Max. “Shit. We have to go to the junkyard right now.”

None of this made any sense, but Warren wasn’t sure what to say as Max and her blue-haired friend zipped by, making a dash for the heavy truck this cavalry rode around in. He and Taylor just watched as they loaded up and zoomed out of the parking lot with incredible haste, leaving a dull roar behind as they disappeared.

This, honestly, was pretty unremarkable after everything else with these two lately. What was remarkable, however, was how one of the two moons seemed to fade, wink like the disrupted light of a star, and then vanish from sight.

“What - the - fuck?” Warren asked, his eyes narrowing up at the sky. As clear as it was that everything on Earth and in the sky was going to shit, that just struck him as really, really bad.   
He just stared up at it for a while, but then he heard something else wrong. Taylor’s breathing. It sounded all sorts of fucked up. He turned to look at her, and found her with her arms wrapped around her abdomen surprisingly tight, and her breathing was shallow and rapid.

“Hey, Taylor, are you okay? Are you having an anxiety attack?” There was finally distinct inflection out of Warren’s constant drawl, but it barely seemed to reach her. He scooted a bit closer to her, trying to see if he was right, but she wasn’t looking up at him.  
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she released, a whimper. “I don’t know what’s happening.” These words only seemed to feed back on her, and he could see that she was becoming more agitated. She raised her hands over her mouth, creating a dome with her palms to increase the CO2 in her lungs.  
Warren tried placing his fingers on her back to rub her spine comfortingly, but she flinched away from him, and he dropped his hand down to the planter’s surface.

“Sorry, Taylor,” he replied, realizing his mistake. “Just focus on those deep breaths; I’ll try and take them with you. I don’t know what’s going on either, but we’ve got to dig through it until we do, okay? Then we can handle it. Come on, in . . .” he breathed in for eight counts - she couldn’t do nearly that, maybe three, but she tried - then released the breath. 

And that’s where they sat for the next several minutes, and as Taylor controlled her breathing, she devolved into sobs, and Warren became completely unaware of how to respond. Somewhere amidst it all, though, Taylor said:  
“Just . . . walk me back to my dorm, okay?”

She pulled out her phone during this second wind, and opened up some app. Warren couldn’t really see what it was, but she stood up, and pressed her thumb against the screen, holding it there even after he agreed. They walked across campus, and she kept her hand inside of her jacket, thumb on that button the whole way.

Warren heard her break apart as soon as she closed the door of her dorm room, and he had no idea what to do.

So, he did what he thought was a good, (drunken?) idea. He went over to Max’s room, found a marker, and scrawled a goodbye note to Taylor on her slate beneath her platitudes to Kate.  
In small text, it read,   
_Thanks for spending the_  
_end of the world with me,_  
 _W_


End file.
